


In All the Old Familiar Places

by NervousAsexual



Category: Fallout 4
Genre: Psychological Trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-07
Updated: 2020-05-07
Packaged: 2021-03-03 05:13:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,272
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24059530
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NervousAsexual/pseuds/NervousAsexual
Summary: Still shell-shocked from the end of the world, Nora takes Codsworth to Concord in search of shelter.
Relationships: Codsworth & Female Sole Survivor
Comments: 1
Kudos: 13





	In All the Old Familiar Places

Most of the doors in Concord were boarded up, but there was one facing Sanctuary Hills that just hung in pieces. It opened to a dark, steep, narrow stairwell, and every step bowed upwards somehow, so that Nora was nervous about falling and Codsworth could barely make it up at all. Unfortunately, it was that or lurk in the doorway, looking out at the rain pouring down on the wreck that had (just a few days ago, it felt like) been the busy downtown.

Her vault suit hung off her, soggy and muddy and too short in the sleeves. The world was in pieces, everyone she ever knew and loved was dead or gone, and she was wearing a grimy oversized onesie. She could have laughed, or she could have cried.

The stairs led up to a second floor apartment and this door was closed and locked and she'd broken her last bobby pin trying to get into Jahani's root cellar. She caught herself trying to knock. This time she did laugh, and she tried not to cry.

"Locked?" Codsworth asked as he came up behind her. "Oh, mum, we shan't let a little thing like that stop us, shall we?"

"What?" She looked back--why? it was too dark to see except by the glow of his thrusters and her pipboy--and he swiveled his limbs around so the buzzsaw faced forward.

"If you'll allow me..." he said. When she stepped aside he revved the buzzsaw and cut through the door as easily as if it were the mountain laurel shrub outside her bedroom window. "Et viola, mum."

She pushed what remained of the door back and immediately inhaled a lungful of dust. Her footsteps on the floorboards stirred up thick clouds of the stuff, tinted greenish in the light of her pipboy. Nora squinted into the darkness and shuffled forward through it.

It was so quiet, so unbelievably quiet. The rain on the roof sounded so far away and the dull roar of Codsworth's thruster seemed so muted she couldn't tell if it was him she heard or just a distant roll of thunder.

She blundered into a desk or a table or something and it jabbed against her knee and brought tears to her eyes, and this time she didn't laugh.

"Quite a climb," Codsworth said. "I wonder how he managed it."

A shiver ran right up her spine and her breath froze in her lungs. Stiffly she turned, thinking of the mutated insects they'd found in Sanctuary Hills, of all the other things radiation could cause, monstrous faceless boogeymen that would kill her right here on the other side of the vault door. She looked for eyes glowing in the light Codsworth gave off. Instead she found a dry dusty skeleton, dressed in tattered rags, lying half on the floor and half against a rusted wheelchair.

"This apartment certainly lacks accessibility features," Codsworth commented. It was such a benign innocent thing to say that she had to turn away, her hand on her mouth and her shoulders shaking with sobs she didn't dare let out.

Foolish thing to do. He was just a machine. What difference did it make what he thought of her? It wouldn't matter to him if she were upset or heartbroken or dead on the inside.

Through the blur of the tears, sharp in her eyes--she was so dehydrated she couldn't even convince them to fall--her vision adjusted to the dark. It was so cramped here, so miserable, so lonely. She wondered if the person in the wheelchair had died suddenly. Had they had to lay there for long, listening to the world end? Or had they been listening long before the bombs fell, even when they were lying in bed, listening to the minutes turn into hours into days and weeks, while the world moved on without them and everything they were supposed to do fell to the wayside?

She wiped her face on her sleeve and turned away. It didn't matter. Nothing mattered, not here in this wasteland.

Nora followed the edge of the room to a tiny dormitory fridge she didn't quite have the courage to open. Stacked on top were a half dozen boxes of snack cakes. She ran her fingers through the thick dust and wiped at her eyes again with the heel of her hand. With the preservatives in those things they always tasted a little stale, and she knew that if she opened a package and took a bit it would taste like a little bit of home even now. But she wasn't hungry. Despite everything that had happened, she still wasn't hungry.

"Oh, mum!" Codsworth said. She started at that; for a moment she'd thought it was a human voice. "Come look at the stars!"

She came over to where he hovered at the window, optical stalks turned up in an almost human display of excitement. She ducked her head and brushed aside the dusty knit curtains. Out over the city the rain had started to clear.

"Do you see that bright one there?" Codsworth asked. "It isn't a star at all. That one is Mars!"

How could he tell? She leaned against him and he bobbled a little under her weight but barely seemed to notice.

"Do you remember the pictures?" he asked.

"Pictures?"

"That Opportunity sent home. The rover, remember? There was a television special shortly before the... er..."

She swallowed the lump in her throat.

"There was a beautiful panorama of the Endeavour Crater. Quite desolate but still beautiful. Not unlike our home, eh, mum?"

She looked out over the battered shell of Concord. She wished that whatever beauty Codsworth saw in the place was evident to her. It had been beautiful once, full of, yes, opportunity, but now it was a wasteland.

"She and I have much in common."

He had been excited, she recalled. Not long after he came into the family the public broadcasting network aired a documentary on how this rover had been expected to run for only three months. They'd been celebrating its fourteenth year on Mars. Codsworth had been so eager to watch the documentary that at first she worried there was something wrong with him, some kind of defect.

"We are both quite knowledgeable about dust. We are both serving the public good." He kept looking up at the sky. "When the bombs fell I thought she must feel the same way I did. I expect she lost contact with her crew quite suddenly. Both of us alone, with no idea if our families were still alive."

Suddenly she realized the dust on her face had grown damp. She touched her cheek and was amazed to realize she was finally crying.

"When I was lonely I thought of her up on Mars, all alone but still doing what she was meant to do." He turned his gaze toward her. "Mum, I never dreamed I might see you again. I can't tell you how very glad I am."

After two hundred years she couldn't believe the rover would still be operating. Somehow that image, of the blocky robotic body alone and unmoving on the surface of a dead planet, hurt even more.

"Mum? Have I made things awkward? I apologize. Sentiment is not my forte. I almost wish I could offer one of those hugs you humans are so fond of."

He was just a machine and it didn't matter what she did, so she wrapped her arms around his dented, scuffed body and held on tight. "Codsworth?"

"Yes, mum?"

"I’m… I’m glad you’re here.”


End file.
